Governing Permanence: Trans Subjects, Time, and the Gender Recognition Act

Abstract

The UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 contains a provision requiring that transgender applicants intend to remain in their acquired gender ‘until death’. While apparently a straightforward administrative demand within a piece of archetypal New Labour legislation, this article argues that the requirement is unnecessary on the legislation’s own terms. Focusing instead on the temporal work that the provision performs in relation to gender recognition, I situate it in relation to New Labour’s ‘social cohesion’ rhetoric in the areas of immigration and race relations and argue that the permanence requirement is a temporal mechanism that links the supposedly linear development of trans bodies with racialized cultural and national integration.